Some 40 years after it was withdrawn from release, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange still hasn't lost the power to shock. Nathan Bevan wonders if he's brave enough to watch it again tonight

That’s not braggadocio I might add, just a plain and simple fact stemming from grandparents being the first people in my family to own a video recorder back in the late ’70s.

One of those clunky top-loading things it was – the size of a Ukrainian exchange student’s suitcase – and, each weekend, they’d rent me the newest title to hit the shelves.

Which meant, at the tender age of eight, I found myself being treated to George A Romero’s X-rated zombie horror classic Dawn Of The Dead.

An act of genuine naivety on their part, it should be said, and probably indicative of happier, more innocent times, but harden me it inevitably did.

And I only mention it because, while zombies have become blasé in modern pop culture – the Romero’s original chilling consumerist satire watered down by a proliferation of endless sequels and lesser imitations – Stanley Kubrick’s dispassionate dystopian nightmare, A Clockwork Orange, still packs a unique gut punch.

Indeed, tell anyone you’re planning that as your ‘popcorn and DVD’ night-in with the kids and chances are a SWAT team from social services will have kicked in the front door before the opening credits have even rolled.

But how come it still has that power, that sense of subversive danger, some 40 years on – especially as it’s been riffed on before now by everyone from Kylie Minogue, who kicked off her 2002 world tour in Cardiff dressed in Malcolm McDowell’s iconic bowler hat and white jump suit from the film, to The Simpsons, who aped the same look for their 1992 Halloween special?

The answer would seem to have a lot to do with the movie disappearing altogether between 1974 and Kubrick’s death in 1999 – pulled from UK cinemas by the director himself following a spate of copycat violent incidents which mirrored some of the movie’s more shocking scenes.

Suddenly, after a successful run at the box office, anyone now wishing to view it had to do so by tracking it down on fuzzy, pirated VHS, thereby lumping it in the same grisly ‘video nasty’ category as notorious flicks like Driller Killer and Cannibal Holocaust which scandalised morals in the early ‘80s – films to which it bore absolutely no resemblance.

Based on Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novella about a boy from a good, middle-class home whoembarks of a life of violent crime, it’s a queasy, uneasy piece of work which, from its discombobulating dialogue – a mishmash of pidgin Russian and mangled Cockney – to its championing of a seemingly irredeemable rapist and murderer as its main protagonist, demands a huge amount of commitment from the viewer.

“It’s an extremely unsettling watch, one that must have felt almost revolutionary upon its release,” says Nathan Abrams, professor of film studies at Bangor University and self-confessed Kubrick expert.

“However, the main reason behind its continuing power to shock, and Kubrick himself concurred with this, is the way McDowell’s Alex DeLarge is portrayed.

“He’s not a cartoon villain, rather someone who’s supremely articulate and charming.

“That hadn’t really been done before and we, completely against our better judgement, find ourselves rooting for him despite the fact he goes round doing all these terrible things.

“In fact, when it gets to part where he’s caught and subjected to the Ludivico technique” – brutal aversion therapy involving looped footage of human atrocities – “we actually start to feel sorry for him and see him as a victim.

The film has also been hugely influential in modern cinema, Abrams argues, not least the infamous rape scene – reportedly inspired when Burgess’ first wife from Monmouthshire was attacked by a gang of American soldiers in 1942.

“For example, the way Kubrick juxtaposes the horror unfolding on screen with an innocuous show tune like Singing In The Rain predates by several decades the likes of Quentin Tarantino and their approach to soundtracking movies," he adds.

“The most important thing to realise though is that it’s not an empty film – it’s quite philosophical in how it examines the nature of free will, identity, morality and counter culture.

“And I dare say the fact it vanished from view for so long has only contributed to its mystique."

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